Excerpt from Celebrated Crimes, Vol. 1 During the night of the fifteenth and sixteenth J anu ary of the year 1343, the people of Naples were aroused with a start from their peaceful slumbers by the ringing of the bells of the three hundred churches of that thrice-blessed capital. In the general confusion caused by this sudden awakening, the first thought which came to everyone's mind was that the whole city was on fire, or that a hostile army had landed under cover of the night, and was putting the citizens to the sword. But the doleful, intermittent clangor of the bells, which broke the silence at long but regular intervals, and called upon the faithful to repeat the prayers for the dying, soon convinced the worthy burghers that no disaster to their beloved city was threatened, but that their king was at the point of death. This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.